The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)

A month or so ago I finally watched the Neon Genesis Evangelion series after hearing about it for more than 20 years. After slogging through a few episodes of predictable awkard-teenagers-pilot-giant-robots-to-save-the-world it finally reveals itself as a stunning exploration into the minds of troubled youth who are, effectively, subjected to a barrage of traumatic crises. It's a deep, rich world with complex characters, all with Herculean responsibilities and human weaknesses.

I'll have to watch Lain now, thanks to your comment.

I enjoy the usual suspects: Akira, Ghost in the Shell (including Standalone Complex), and Cowboy Bebop immensely. I like Robotech, though much of it is nostalgia. But I've found straying from the essentials to be challenging for my very Western tastes.

I tried to watch Stein's Gate and thought it was very clever, but the awkward romance and over-the-top characteristics of the main character were a bit too much. Knights of Sidonia and Attack on Titan got too weird, too quickly. I was too old for Dragonball. There's a lot of Western-focused, Japanese-animated options out there, but they almost universally lack the depth of their anime counterparts.

I'd love some recommendations if you have any, whether they be newer stuff or classics that I've overlooked.

The great thing about animation is that once you accept the cartoonish caricatures as real people, you get all of the special effects for free. You don't have that jarring disconnect between the actors and the (bad) special effects, and you don't need to husband your special effects budget carefully, saving it for a few big scenes. You can fill each frame with impossibilities that are just as real as the people filling them.

Serial Experiments Lain felt very much like a dark dream when I watched it. And because it was so different from the mainstream stereotypical anime which can easily fit into well defined (and IMO overdone) categories.

But I also think it's different from the sort of 'aim at western audience' type of anime (to be frank the appeal is a bit different from asia perspective, at least for me). The dark universes of Akira and Ghost in a Shell have some equivalent in the cyberpunk genre in the west, e.g elements of a dystopian society, which do not feature too often in the Japanese anime world. In that sense Lain really experiments with the genre and rebel against the typical characters and gave it a unique style (hence the name I guess :)

Growing up, i was a lot like you. The stories, artwork and animation in a lot of those darker, more adult animes blew my mind. I remember the first time I saw Akira, like you when I was probably way too young, My mind just couldn't even really grasp what i was watching. I'd never seen anything like that before. I ended up somehow watching a dubbed version of ninja scroll that came on TV some time after that and i was pretty hooked.

I find though, I can't get into newer anime, or a lot of newer animation in general these days. I really miss the old style of animation and artwork, both western and Japanese. Every series or movie had its own unique style, some of the artwork was so fantastic and just mind blowing. Some of the landscapes and scenery created in older animation could take you to some of the most amazing or terrifying or strange places you couldn't even imagine.

I find a lot of animation to look generic and overproduced these days and in general, the format's become fairly formulaic and nothing really stands out as special in the ways a lot of those older animes did. Don't get me wrong, i have seen some fantastic modern animation. I was speaking more in general.

I keep hoping that we'll have this Renaissance of artists who want to go back to the traditional ways just to break this new mold animation seems to have gotten itself stuck in.

There is still a void, which various artists could fill these days. Sadly, if they did I don't think I would hear about them due to the volume of content on streaming platforms.

Japanese studio anime follows a formula that you might have noticed. This formula is still unnecessary to western audiences, which has learned to tolerate it. It includes characters with certain hair colors having certain behaviors and relationships to the protagonist, it includes a filler episode at a sauna.

Something like Cowboy Bebop would be a hit in the west, for the same reasons that The Expanse - which is not anime - is a hit. But Japanese studios gravitate towards portraying fantasies only relatable and comfortable to a socially awkward viewer, while Western studios don't invest heavily enough into what fans of the medium and anime art-style would like, and still target children.

> Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format.

Agreed. Check out Final Space. It relies a bit on comedy in the beginning but grows into a drama. Give it a few episodes.

It's amazing to see mainstream America discover, with our television Renaissance, what most otaku knew and took for granted since the 90s. I hear family talk about the latest It Show, and it's almost word for word what you would have found on the more polite anime forums back in the day. Even the premises echo: of Record of Lodoss War and all its derivatives in Game of Thrones, of Gundam and Cowboy Bebop in The Expanse. Don't think for a second that TV producers aren't mining the rich veins of both conceptual and visual "basic research" anime creators have done on what "works" for the extended fiction format and action-oriented television.

The one thing I will say is that, as an anime watcher, you do start to pick up on the repetitive tropes that might have felt fresh in your first few series, and with the aforementioned unsavory pandering towards the figma crowd, American TV that apes anime definitely has me less fatigued or concerned about sharing my enthusiasm with any particular show with F&F.

> Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes.

Check out Infinity Train for something different. Ostensibly aimed at kids, but, uh, honestly, I seriously question that based on some of the content in that show [0]. Between that and Over the Garden Wall, Cartoon Network's contributed some great work to American animation in recent years.

Amazon's Invincible is having a good run so far, on the side of things definitely made for adults.

[0] MASSIVE MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgeSJhXNeQ&t=64

> They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes.

For the opposite experience, have a look at UK dramas. They're often mini-series with as few as 6 episodes, well defined story and aren't afraid to try new stuff.

For example "Behind her eyes" (not a cartoon) is a recent good one. (don't be deceived by the first episode, it's not as simple as it seems)

I see no mention of Gunnm (battle angel alita) OAV was nicely done even though short. The manga has lot to offer somehow.

This same effect can be seen in Japanese games from that era—I didn’t watch much anime, but I was absolutely consumed by Japanese RPGs. Xenogears changed my life.

I watched one Japanese cartoon once in my childhood.

There was a flying robots flying killing everybody. Do you know its's name? I always wanted to rewatch it, but have no idea what's its name.

I'm trying to piece together what I watched in childhood.

Since a few years ago, people who are more into cartoons cued me on that:

Blue alien who shoots lasers from its bra is Guyver, and that it's not an alien, and is a guy.

A communist coup in space is Ryvius, and on a closer look, communists were actually high class cadets with parents in high up places, and not the other way around.

European comics and novels did that before Japan ;). And with far more mature and adult themes.

Have any good adult animes come out these past few years? There's always been a lot of gross stuff but I'm starting to lose faith in the medium when I see stuff like Mushoku Tensei being praised as wonderful in the mainstream, the latest few seasons have felt like complete garbage.

> It's interesting how two people can have diametrically opposite readings of the same piece of art.

Mostly because Chiaki Konaka is incapable of writing endings. I don't think Lain is that abstract (there's some early parts that look like it but I think are meant to be representative of schizophrenia), but it is hard to follow what the last episode is saying even though they're talking nonstop. With such a heavy script you can't always trust the translation to present it well either.

"A young girl can't stop posting" as a description for SEL is like describing Pan's Labyrinth as "a young girl struggles with mental illness in wartime".

Never trust a "journalist," or anyone who uses the phrase "very online" to review anime in a meaningful way. I stayed away from Mob Psycho for ages because of nutty articles like this reading meaning and intention into it to a degree that would have made Freud blush. It's all just projection. To some people, everything has to be about preaching ideology, spreading their collection of neat, tidy just-so stories about how the world works. They can't just let the work speak for itself.

Glad to see this though, because it reminds me I should get around to finally trying Lain. Oh, and I highly recommend Mob Psycho as well.

> Where new worlds could be built, shaped by the will of the participants as opposed to the hard rules of physics, therefore granting a whole set of new universes in which to search for meaning.

There was a social oriented MUD in the 90's exploring that.

As much as I liked the anime, I tend to put it into the "pseudo-profound bullshit" category. They drop in loads of philosophical concepts, fringe science, wild extrapolation, and a bit of conspiracies and paranormal. There is no way you can't make parallels with the real world.

If may sound harsh but it is not a bad thing. It creates an atmosphere, and it is thought provoking, as evidenced by the article. It is a work of fiction, and fiction is like magic, it is all fake, but we enjoy being tricked into it. And that is a perfectly good trick when well executed.

Maybe Lain overdid it a bit, but I enjoyed the show, and for me, it is the important part.

Even if you if you think the show is lacking substance, however you define that, there's more to a show than just the story. The character designs (and art direction in general), music, sci-fi setting, Apple references, etc. are all other reasons for its critical success & popularity (or maybe cult following is the right term, I don't know). That the soundtracks and artbooks are still so sought after is a testament to that.

>"deep for the sake of being deep"

It is babies first philosophy: the anime. Nothing wrong with liking it, the problem comes when people think it is deeper than it actually is. It is quaint when viewed through current affairs, and much like the article, absolute thesaurus bait pretending to be something more.

This has a lot less to do with the modern world than Lain does. Yes, even with COVID. Do you mean it's predicting some future state of the world that you expect to come to be?

The "meeting in person is odd, interactions are typically machine-mediated and remote" thing was also done (most famously) by EM Forster (1909; collected 1928), and also by Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956 publication; based on a 1948 novella, though I don't know whether that element was present in it as I've only read the novel). Probably a bunch of others, too. I'd rank the oracular qualities of Asimov's sci-fi fairly low, so far as that matters (shrug), especially for any original and not already-tropey-by-the-time-he-did-it ideas of his.

Asimov's use of the trope in that story had more to do with creating a setting as much the opposite of the packed-like-sardines city-world of the first Robot Detective book than trying to predict anything, or to present the mostly-remote-interaction society thing as a novel notion per se. The defining characteristics of the society on that planet were extreme wealth, individualism, and personal-security paranoia. Their interaction habits fell out of those traits and preferences.

If you want to go even further back, I recently discovered "The Machine Stops" from 1909, which covers a fair bit of that: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...

I think about this all the time. When I read it way back when I thought it sounded like an absurd extrapolation of the future. And yet here we are.

What’s the title of the book?

The weird thing is that Evangelion and Lain (and other stuff like them) came out in the early 2000s, and really fit that era. Steins;Gate came out in 2011, but feels like an early 2000s anime, in both visual style, writing, mood etc. I suppose that's somewhat fitting given the content of the show though.

In case you or anyone else doesn't already know, ABe also livestreams on his YouTube channel. Recently he's been drawing a new short manga.

https://youtube.com/c/abflygm

I would recommend watching also Dennou Coil - it seems to me like similarly prescient description of how advanced Augmented Reality might look like - where you are in a physical world but can't be sure anymore that what you see is physically here or was added (or altered!) by the undistinguishable AR overlay.